Executive Summary State of Sales 4 What trends define the new era of 01 Rethinking Success: Customer Experience Is Now the Top Sales Benchmark selling? Technology-empowered and (See page 9) information-savvy customers now In today’s connected marketplace, informed customers have more power to dictate which expect sales reps to be intuitive, businesses lead — and which fall behind. As a result, sales teams are pivoting to focus on customer- knowledgeable, fast, and personal. centricity. This shift is influencing sales teams to think differently about how they quantify success. The new blueprint of sales replaces Customer experience/success is ranked as the top type of KPI used to measure success. product pitches with tailored 02 A New Sales Blueprint: Sales Becomes More Connected and Proactive customer solutions, reshapes (See page 12) traditional success metrics to prioritize Sales teams must reimagine the traditional sales approach in order to keep up with customer customer experience, and overhauls preferences for instant, tailored, and always-on sales. Leading teams are better at understanding business-as-usual processes with and anticipating their customers’ needs with collaboration, strong partner ecosystems, cross- innovative technology adoption. As channel interactions, and immediate engagement. High performers are 2.9x more likely than underperformers to strongly agree their company is available to customers anytime. companies ready for the intelligent marketplace of the future, successful 03 The Productivity Gap: Top Sales Teams Turn to Tech and Training sales teams are arming their reps with (See page 17) smarter selling capabilities. Facing increased customer demands, sales teams can no longer afford to be hindered by time-consuming and manual administrative tasks. Top teams are bullish on This report takes a deeper look into technology that will help them close the productivity gaps, while others continue to lag how the role of sales is changing and behind. Among sales teams that cite ineffective internal processes as their top challenge, excessive administrative tasks was the top cause. what defines success in the Age of the Customer. Here is an overview of 04 Smarter Selling: Intelligent Sales Takes Off top findings from our research. (See page 22) Intelligent technologies with the ability to automate, simplify, and ultimately transform the sales process are no longer confined to wish lists — they’re here now. In fact, triple-digit growth is expected in areas such as predictive intelligence (118%), lead-to-cash process automation (115%), and artificial intelligence (139%) in the next three years. SalesforSalesforcce Re Researesearchch